Watchers 1
20x20cm, oil on canvas

Part 1 of the Watchers series

While I was making these little paintings, I began to feel as though strange creatures were appearing in them — soft, fleshy things bubbling up at the edges of our reality to see what we are doing.

I liked the idea that they weren’t quite here. Their bodies are distorted and only partly formed, as though whatever is looking through hasn’t entirely understood what it means to have a physical body, or how one is supposed to fit together. There is something slightly unsettling about them, but also curious and almost tender. I don’t imagine them watching us with any particular purpose. They are simply interested.

Watchers grew out of my continuing fascination with perception and the strange relationship between observer and observed. We tend to assume that we are the ones looking out at the world, but these paintings play with the possibility of that relationship being reversed — of something just beyond the limits of our perception looking back.

And perhaps the boundary between the two is not quite as solid as we think.